Jason was partly right that decentralized / federated competitors to incumbent social networks would emerge, but the core claim that they would be “impossible to ban” is falsified.

Evidence that decentralized platforms did emerge and compete:

• Mastodon, an open‑source, federated microblogging platform, grew to around 9 million accounts and about 1–1.5 million active users, explicitly positioned as a decentralized alternative to X/Twitter.(thinkimpact.com)
• Bluesky, built on the decentralized AT Protocol, launched publicly in 2023–24 and surpassed 30–38 million registered users with ~4.1 million daily active users by mid‑2025, widely described as a strong decentralized competitor and credible alternative to X.(socialplug.io)
• Protocols like Nostr (2020+) explicitly aim to provide censorship‑resistant, decentralized social networking.(en.wikipedia.org)
  These confirm the “free‑market solutions” and decentralized competitors part of his prediction.

Evidence against “impossible to ban” by centralized actors (app stores, governments, etc.):

• Apple threatened to remove, and then did remove/force changes to Damus, a popular Nostr client, from the iOS App Store over its Bitcoin tipping (“zaps”) feature; Damus’ developer ultimately removed the feature to remain in the store.(forbes.com) This is a direct example of a decentralized social client being effectively deplatformed or functionally constrained by an app‑store gatekeeper.
• The same Damus app had earlier been removed from Apple’s Chinese App Store, demonstrating that regional bans by centralized intermediaries are straightforward even for decentralized protocols.(9to5mac.com)
• Reports indicate China has blocked or banned use of the Nostr network for enabling censorship‑resistant communication, showing that a state‑level actor can significantly restrict access to such protocols at the network level.(nostr.com)
• In the U.S., Bluesky itself blocked all Mississippi IP addresses rather than comply with the state’s stringent age‑verification law, meaning users in that jurisdiction must resort to workarounds (e.g., VPNs) to reach the service.(theverge.com) This illustrates that access to a decentralized social platform can, in practice, be cut off for an entire region.

Collectively, these cases show that while decentralized and federated social platforms have indeed emerged and now act as meaningful (if smaller) competitors to incumbent centralized platforms, they are still vulnerable to deplatforming, blocking, and feature‑level coercion by centralized intermediaries such as app stores, national governments, and ISPs. That directly contradicts Jason’s stronger claim that such peer‑to‑peer platforms would be “impossible to ban.”

Because the most specific, risky part of the prediction (effective impossibility of bans by centralized actors) has clearly not held up, the overall prediction is best classified as wrong.